I was so amazed by the contrast, not only in images but also in the absence of all those catchy headlines on the old magazine cover. That’s when I became very curious to see how other magazine covers evolved over time. When and how did our perceptions and values change? How was the branding developed? When did we start promote magazines, books, websites, blogs differently? What’s with our obsession with writing the eye-catching titles, when did that become so important?

1. Time

If you look at my collage above with the Time magazine covers, you’ll get some answers to those questions. On the very first issue of the first weekly news magazine in US you’ll notice the absence of the iconic red border on the March 1923 cover, which instead featured an ornate border with a black&white drawing of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. It will take almost 4 years for Time publishers to finally come up with the unique branding feature of the magazine, although the January 1927 issue still kept the ornate border, that would soon disappear from future editions.

In April 1966 Time magazine used a type only cover for the first time in its controversial issue questioning “Is God Dead?”. Until 1970s the covers were always featuring one topic, unlike most magazine covers today where readers are bombarded with intriguing titles. The shift towards featuring more than one topic can be seen on the December 1980 cover dedicated to John Lennon – the top right corner appears folded out, revealing another story: “Poland: The Test of Wills”. Finally, the modern issues of TIME magazine are devoting the top section of the cover to three additional topics besides the one in the main area.

2. Cosmopolitan

Over a century old, originally Cosmopolitan was launched as a family magazine in 1886. The changes in owners over the years were obviously reflecting its style and content. Did you know that George Bernard Shaw was writing for the early issues of Cosmopolitan?

Compare the cover of March 1894 issue with the May 1896 edition, and then December 1929 issue with the June 2007 – almost a century later. What a mind-boggling difference, wouldn’t you agree? The first issues of Cosmo looked more like journals with the book-like content structure on the cover and were not that aesthetically pleasant as the future editions. If look closely, you’ll notice that already in 1894 Cosmopolitan tried accentuating two of the magazine articles in Big headlines at the top.

However, it will take a few more decades for Cosmo creators to learn how to lure readers with the shocking headlines like “13 Ways To Feminine Satisfaction”, which were cleverly targeting not only women but also men, especially with headlines like these: “Wives Who Cheat – the surprising facts most men couldn’t imagine” or “My Husband Taught Me To Drive (right up the wall!)”.

3. Vogue

Vogue was established as a fashion society magazine in 1892, and considered by many as the “most influential fashion magazine”. Note the modifications in the choice of the typeface for the title, style and illustrations from September 1916 to January 1926 to the modern days.
Check out the August 1940 cover where the title was spelled out by the model in different positions. Once again, no multiple headlines were popping at Vogue readers until decades later.

4. Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair was successfully launched in 1914. Already in 1915 it featured more pages of ads than any other US magazines. It however “died” in 1936 only to be “resurrected” in 1983. Today the magazine is well known for its controversial photography, covers and articles, including the May 2006 edition that revealed the identity of Deep Throat, who was the source of all the scoop on the Watergate scandal.

Perhaps we can discover the secret of its success by following the growth of the magazine from its inaugural issue of 1914 to caricature illustrations of 1930s to the provocative 1991 cover with pregnant Demi Moore by famous celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz to the modern editions.

5. Rolling Stone

Who would’ve thought that the first issue of the world’s most famous music magazine was only a newspaper, but the one that stood out amongst other underground newspapers from the very beginning. Jann Wenner, one of the magazine founders who is still its editor and publisher, wrote that Rolling Stone “is not just about the music, but about the things and attitudes that music embraces.”

The amazing thing about the Rolling Stone’s metamorphosis from a newspaper to magazine is the fact that, unlike many other famous publications, it kept practically the same typeface and style for the title logo from its birth in 1967 all the way to the XXI century.

“In 1970, with the arrival of Annie Leibovitz, an art student in San Francisco, the cover of Rolling Stone went from spontaneous to specially crafted”, reflected Jann Wenner in the 1000th issue of the magazine with a very expensive 3D cover that featured 154 of Wenner’s celebrity friends. (If anyone who reads this post owns that collector’s issue, would you please ship it to me for free? ;-))

Rolling Stone’s 1981 cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was proclaimed to be the best magazine cover of the last 40 years by American Society Of Magazine Editors. That photograph was taken by Leibovitz just hours before Lennon was shot in December 1980.

6. National Geographic

National Geographic Magazine published its first issue in 1888 as the official journal of the National Geographic Society (later the word “Magazine” was dropped from the title).

Check out the magazine’s cover transformation from the issue of January 1915 to July 1969 to April 2007. For almost a century every cover of the magazine is framed with the distinctive yellow border, that makes National Geographic branding instantly recognizable.

The magazine has earned the world’s recognition with its book-like quality and the high-caliber photojournalism. The 1985 cover photo by Steve McCurry has eternalized the image of the 13-year old Afghan refuge Sharbat Gula and became one of the most widely reproduced photos in the world.

7. Fortune

Fortune magazine was founded by the media tycoon Henry Luce in February 1930, only four months after the Wall Street crash in 1929. The magazine indeed cost a “fortune” – $1 at a time when New York Times was only 5 cents. Was it the craziest ever move in the publishing industry? You be the judge – today the magazine is the Technorati version in the world of business with its ranked list of Fortune 500.

I was quite surprised to discover such artistic and creative covers of the early editions of Fortune magazine: from the illustration on the cover of August 1930 issue to the original presentation of Fortune’s business directory on the cover of July 1957.

8. Esquire

Esquire was founded in 1933 as a magazine for men, and also thrived during the Depression era. The early editions became very popular due to the contributions of such renowned writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Just like with Rolling Stone, Esquire’s title typeface and style didn’t have substantial changes, except the type got thicker – take a look at the cover of October 1933 all the way to the present days using the handy search tool in the Esquire cover archive.

Sure, writing arresting headlines will help you to get the readers attention, but when you combine them with a killer art, such as the cover of May 1969 issue with Art Director George Lois’s production of the drowning Andy Warhol in its own iconic art creation, can of Campbell Soup, you get a bomb exploding in people’s heads when reading the shocking headline: “The final decline and total collapse of the American avant-garde” and looking at the screaming for help celebrity.

And sometimes all you need is a picture to deliver the message and get the expected reaction. George Lois definitely knew how to achieve that when he designed the cover of April 1968, with a depiction of Muhhamad Ali pierced with six arrows as St. Sebastian. Everyone immediately associated that cover with Muhammad Ali’s indictment for refusing to fight in the Vietnam war: “I Ain’t Got No Quarrel With The VietCong…”

I’m also very impressed by the Esquire cover designs in 2007, where Type is used not only for presenting headlines, but also cleverly integrated with the design itself and becoming an essential part of the overall image of the magazine.

Conclusion

So when exactly and WHO started the trend of luring readers with numerous catchy headlines, screaming from the magazine covers to be picked up, read and even purchased or subscribed to? Looks like from the middle of the twentieth century headlines started playing an essential role in magazine covers.

Hopefully, this article has inspired you to be more creative when coming up with the striking titles and meaningful images for your blogs.

Another interesting description of me in a horoscope is the one about my past life. It says that in another life I was a Bedouin. Perhaps that’s why I love travel so much. The first time my mother took me on a plane I was only 40 days old. Since then I travelled quite often with my family and on my own, not as frequently as I’d like to, but I can’t complain.

Travel makes me feel adventurous: I’m not afraid of taking risks, hoping on a train or a bus and exploring the cities with a map in my hand. I feel like a sponge – soaking up different cultures, getting inspired by foreign architecture, and even though later on I get squeezed by the grueling line ups at the airport and long flights, I spring back to the original shape, filled with long lasting amazing memories and feeling very happy to be back home.

Despite being away from my family I did enjoy my business trip. At the conference I’ve met many interesting people from all over the world, united with their support and love for everything Open Source. The highlight of my stay in Norway was the five hours boat trip down the river with my colleagues from several international offices of the company. Of course, I took many photos of the beautiful scenery around us.

On our way back we were flying via Amsterdam and had to wait 7 hours at the airport for our transfer flight to Vancouver. I hate waiting, so I convinced my colleague to hop on a train and explore Amsterdam for at least 5 hours. That’s what we did. On the way back we were dead from so much walking, but feeling very content. We managed to take lots of pictures of this charming city with its stunning canals, myriad of bikes and bikers, visit two museums: we saw Rembrandt at Reiks museum and Van Gogh and other impressionists at the Van Gogh museum.

One piece of advise for those of you who go on unplanned trips to Europe – get some local cache at either the train station or the airport, enough to buy some food, bus tickets and even museum tickets. We had a really hard time at first – nobody was accepting our credit cards, until we found a currency exchange place and luckily had some Canadian and Norwegian money left that we converted to euros. So if you don’t know the code to get cash from your credit card (I never use my credit cards for cash advances, hence never had a need to know the code), make sure you travel with some cash in your wallets.

In a few hours we’ll be finally landing in Vancouver airport. I wish they had an internet access on the plane, then I would’ve published this post right away. It is the XXI century after all, why there is no internet on the plane? Oh well, at least I have enough charge left on my laptop to finish this article and perhaps start another one. I want to try and spend as much time with my family as possible. It’s good to travel, but it’s even better to be back home. What do you think?

Surprisingly, I didn’t find too many original websites featuring photographer’s portfolio. Many sites were based on a couple of similar Content Management System, so they had the same navigation and main features. But I did come across some really fascinating “photofolios”. I was using three different resources for my research:

1. StumbleUpon – if you haven’t yet installed this useful Firefox Add-on, then I highly recommend you to do so. You can select a number of various categories that you want to browse and start Stumbling upon interesting sites on the Internet. I simply selected Photography section, and was clicking my way through various photography related sites.
2. Google – searching for keywords like “photography portfolio”, “creative photography”, “famous photographers”, etc.
3. The Photobloggies – Annual Photoblog Awards – I was very glad to find this similar to Weblog Awards website. Make sure to check out the contestants of 2007 Photobloggies, the winners will be announced on May 1, 2007.

While looking for some creative good-looking photography sites I came across some very interesting website with unusual topics. So I’ll be sharing with you both kinds of websites. The photography itself is a work of art on most of these site, and there are so many stunning photos, that I won’t be mentioning about them in my review – I’ll leave them up to you to discover.

8 Elegant Portfolios

1. Donata Wenders – a fascinating portfolio piece with three main categories each presented in a unique way: works from Galleries section are displayed as pictures on the walls of a Gallery-like interface; People and Places shots are hanging in a photographer’s studio; Movies section is showcased in a theatre-like layout, on a big screen.
   
2. Whateverland – a beautifully designed photoblog with carefully thought navigation: you can browse the archives, or visit today/yesterday’s photos, find out all about the photographer’s equipment and even browse other photoblogs from author’s collection.
   
3. Visual Relax – a nice photoblog featuring works of 3 photographers, the navigation presents a long bar with linked dates and months. Later on I found several other websites that used the same type of navigation, so I’m assuming they’re using the same CMS for these sites. I must admit it works really well, easy to use.
   
4. PHOTOMO – such a clean and poised website, very simple to navigate and pleasant to explore. Make sure to check out the Guestmap and Links sections after going through the photos.
   
5. Eolo Perfido – this website comes with a very effective horizontal scrolling for browsing the photos from various Galleries.
   
6. Kim Gottlieb-Walker – it’s a must see website for both design inspiration and the fascinating collection of celebrity photographs.
   
7. Steve McCurry – an exquisitely designed website in Flash with gorgeous burgundy colour scheme.
   
8. Michael Muller – another Flash website with an extraordinary way to view photos within a category – just mouse over the featured photo from different directions and you’ll see what I mean. You can spot many celebrity photos here as well.
   

8 Original Topics

1. Self-Portrait Day – I could’ve easily placed this site in my Beautiful sites category, if not for the peculiar topic of this photoblog – members of this site are sending their self-portraits. However the goal of this blog is much more than a “15 seconds” fame: “We hope that Self-Portrait Day functions as a way for people to find new sites. For those of us who find we’re following the same circle of Web sites every day, we hope that this will act as a way to discover new places. Basically, it’s a launching pad: almost every portrait should lead you somewhere new.”
   
2. Express Train – I really like what this website is all about – photos from the author’s daily commute (three trains, 11 stops, and 45 minutes each way) to work in Manhattan and back home to Brooklyn. I wonder how do people on the train react when he takes their photos?
   
3. San Francisco Daily Photography – the title says it all – riveting photographs of urban life in San Francisco. This website has inspired me to start a similar site for Vancouver. Now all I need is to finally get a professional DSLR and start polishing my photography skills. I also found another blog with a similar topic: Buenos Aires Daily.
   
4. Outafocus – I never thought that out of focus blurry pictures can look so good and be so mesmerizing.
   
5. The Mirror Project – featuring site members who “have photographed themselves in all manner of reflective surfaces”. There are some very finny and clever shots.
   
6. Cara Barer – Her Book Project started from finding a deserted soiled copy of the Yellow Pages. Now she works with many other books (some bought at discount, others are found or donated by friends), transforming them into organic sculptures.
   
7. Drive Back in Time – Don’t be deceived by these photos thinking that they were taken in the old days of the last century. Most of the photos were shot between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine. Dmitry Popov carefully researches the era when the cars for his photographs were produced and then arranges the photo shoot accordingly. “The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era.”
   
8. Nick Brandt – His photographs of Wild animals are the most spellbinding photos that I’ve ever seen. I would love to visit one of his exhibitions and see the photographs in full size.
   

So here you go. Hope you’ve enjoyed my photography bits as much as I did. And if you know of any other amazing photography portfolio sites, please, share them with us here.

I must admit that it was quite challenging to take photos and keep an eye on my daughter who couldn’t resist from going and knocking down those cans and bottles. Fortunately, they had a separate room filled with cans where kids could play and build their own towers. So at the end I let her go there and do whatever her heart desired.

There were many amazing sculptures that deserved to be recognized and admired, but these are my best picks:

PASSION TO FEED – you can see my sneaky daughter stepping on those bottles in the corner, while I was taking this picture.

CALLED FOR DINNER – notice the Campbell Soup “painting” by Andy Warhol on the wall?

THE BC LIONS GREY CUP CAN-TATA – dedicated to the local BC Lions football team’s victory in 2006 Grey Cup Game.

CAN YOU FIND TREASURE ISLAND – very spooky and imaginative.

So as you can see above, everybody has different favourite things: helping less fortunate, going out for dinner, watching football or reading a book. Besides playing with my daughter, my favourite things are kayaking with my husband (not anymore, until our daughter is big enough to join us), traveling, going for a walk or a bike ride. Of course, there are many other things that I like, but I don’t want to keep you away for too long from your favourite things.

By the way, what are you favourite things?